Old Feuds: Part 2 of 4

I've written about this before, a long-ago campus email war with another teacher at Butte College, a Mexican-American guy who was, without doubt, the worst teacher I ever knew over some 40 years of teaching in four different colleges.

He was deeply bitter toward Anglos, a bitterness that surely has some justification given the history between people of the United States and people of Mexican descent. But his bitterness was laced with bigotry that prejudiced him against white folks, made him rude to white students in his classes, and diverted his instruction from the course description (which was mostly writing) to race baiting that had nothing to do with what students signed on for, and needed so desperately to learn.

When he assigned papers, he didn't read them, or he read them only cursorily, returning them weeks after they were turned in. He missed six or eight days each semester, and he was nearly always late when he did show up. When he didn't feel like talking about the plight of Mexican-Americans, he showed videos. Student complaints piled up, but there was no administrative will to take on a guy who, everyone knew, would cry racism as soon as he was criticized.

This terrible teacher had it in his power to derail fragile student restarts, attempts by kids who hadn't done well in high school to get their lives back on track. Many of these students, of various colors and ethnicities, came to community college from pretty rocky lives, and the return to school, though filled with hope, was tenuous. They were like the kind of plants on sale at drug stores, heavily discounted because they'd been poorly tended, offering little hope of surviving once the customer took them to the garden unless cared for with tenderness. And that was not what they got from this sorry excuse for a teacher.

As bad as his classroom performance was, however, he was also intent on diverting the aim of the affirmative action program so as to ensure that only people of color would be seriously considered for any new full time positions. I supported Affirmative Action when it was initiated, and I support it now, even though it has been badly abused and distorted from its original goals and intent.

My Mexican-American colleague had previously gotten himself on a screening committee in the Sociology department where he insisted on skewing that hiring process to a predetermined racial outcome. He met a little resistance from the head of that department, and he immediately took up the cry of racism against her, even to the extent of excoriating her in his classes.

When he tried to railroad the English Department into the same kind of rigged outcome, he met with less resistance. I wasn't on that hiring committee, but when I read the memo he wrote that laid out his determination to ensure that only applicants of color had a real shot at the advertised position, I took issue with this subversion of the affirmative action process, objecting to his attempt to discriminate against people who might travel to be interviewed in a competition in which they were out of contention before they ever left home.

The irony, of course, is that this was once the routine experience for people of color who were interviewed for jobs they never stood a chance of getting. (Read Ellison's Invisible Man; it's instructive on the subject.)

My Mexican-American colleague dashed off a campus-wide email calling me a racist, and otherwise blustering about the need to hire a person of color "no matter what." And I wrote the first of a succession of emails in which I argued against discrimination on the basis of race, adding that if a job was open only to people of color, then we should at least make that clear when we advertised the position (which, of course, would be illegal).

But the intimidation was such that almost no one in the campus community (with the exception of Dr. Roger Ekins, who was then Division Chair) shared my view enough to speak up on the issue. Dr. Ekins was also written off as a racist, a scurrilous bit of business made easier in his case because his religious faith was seen as prima facie evidence of his ethnic prejudices.

One of those who remained silent on this issue was a man who now brags about his volunteer work for the PCTN, a person who couldn't see then, and can't see now, how that old memo war was not a personal dispute, but a matter of fundamental principle. People who volunteer to work for "tolerance" should know without being told that discriminating against people on the basis of color ain't a personal matter, nor should they need to have it explained that racism can come in many colors. Duh.

I was ostracized at work during that dust up. When I'm reminded of that episode, as I was recently, and of the ethical cowardice of colleagues, both the so-called liberals and the so-called conservatives, it angers me still, more than a decade later. But most of that anger is now reserved for my former colleagues, not the zealous crusader for skewed hiring who at least had the courage of his convictions, however wrongheaded and racist they were.